As Guild Wars 2 continues the apparently long road towards the expansion Heart of Throrns things keep changing in the game world. The hype is real and the preorders have already been announced—we even had a Revenant, a new class coming with the expansion, appear in the main social hub of the game. The problem? It taking ArenaNet, developer of GW2, far too long to release information about what’s in the expansion.

The GW2 community right now relies heavily on dataminers such as that_shaman from Reddit to reveal what ArenaNet has not. Leaks have been leading the way in information about HoT for the past few months.

“Hey there,” the Borg chef said. “Can I perhaps implore you to stop shooting the employees? They’re just trying to do their job.”

“They tried to asssimilate usss,” Boots hissed with a sneer. He pointed his rapier directly at the throat of the drone and growled.

Helvetica put up a silencing hand and Boots stepped back. “The reception we’ve been given has been less than peachy,” she said. “In fact, I’d say that the hard sell is what goes for a greeting around these parts. They stop doing that and I’ll stop shooting them.”

“They are just doing their jobs,” the chef drone said.

He shook his head and went about wiping down the counter in front of them—which, to Helvetica, appeared spotless. As he worked, she inspected him. He looked to have once been human. Slightly taller than she even as he stood with a slightly stopped posture, perhaps from years of tending …

ArenaNet just let us in on the next specialization to be found in the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns upcoming expansion and it means that guardians will be getting bows. The bow is the one spirit weapon that guardians can summon they they could not yet equip on their own–amid shield, sword, and hammer. The elite specialization, named “dragonhunter,” also adds guardians to the list of professions who can use traps, which includes necromancers, theives, and rangers.

Looking at the bow skills, it’s a standard array of attacks, coupled with interesting guardian-centric light effects. Shots cripple, blind, and in the case of latter AoE attacks there’s some of that lovely, lovely burning. These skill synergize with traits that can be selected for the …

Time to make some room, Necromancers, it looks like ArenaNet is giving mesmers the ability to crease ground wells with the elite specialization for mesmers, a time-based elite class called the Chronomancer. This specialization is part of the upcoming expansion to Guild Wars 2, Heart of Thorns, and will introduce special classes for every current profession in the game. chronomancers will also give mesmers access to a new weapon: the offhand shield.

The new chronomancer specialization adds a set of skills to mesmers to allows them to manipulate the forces of time. The first new skill adds a boon called alacrity–the opposite of chill–which will speed up cooldowns rather than slowing them down, only chronomancers will receive access to this boon. With an offhand shield the chronomancer will be able to fire a wall of compressed time that flies forward and then returns, with each pass the wall delivers quickness to allies …

This MMO Anthropology interview features Arienne Keith, player of “Euclidia” and “Mover Shaker” from Guild Wars 2. As a player she enjoys the monstrosities that come with the Necromancer class as well as the abilities of the Mesmer. The former for killing foes in PvE and the latter for helping out new (and old) players in jumping puzzles across the map.

In recent days Arienne has been working on her Mesmer, Mover Shaker, who has been porting people across the ends of numerous jumping puzzles to get them a chance at the delicious-delicious-loot at the end.

GW Players Alliance show hosts Cithryth and Draculetta will be joining MMO Anthropology host Amerist, co-host Nelson Williams (editor-and-chief of this blog) and Dracul Draconicus in Guild Wars 2 to discuss the state of the game, what players want, and actually play the game.

Feel free to tune in at 9pm MST and stay until 12 midnight. If you own Guild Wars 2 you can come along as well, but the team will be full—however, the host, Amerist has a commander tag so can make a squad and bring as many people as needed into open world content.

Perfect World Entertainment and Cryptic Studios MMO Star Trek Online’s Stephen D’Angelo is stepping down as Executive Producer to be seceded by Stephen Ricossa.

D’Angelo is best known by the community as the guy who descended into the forums to tell the playerbase how it was when Cryptic Studios claimed there was an exploit in a patrol in Tau Dewa. Leading to a great deal of animosity from the playerbase who had not entirely known that what happened in the patrol mission in question was actually an exploit at all.

In Ricossa’s acceptance blog post, he hinted at the potential for future STO changes and content, specifically teasing a much-waited-on change to sector space:

“With the launch of Season 10 Sector Space will be comprised of only three maps, with each one representing a quadrant that exists in STO. Yes, the sector walls are coming

This weekend saw the news that AOL is rolling the Joystiq brand into its Engadget blog and while doing so shutting down MMO blogs Massively and WoW Insider. It will be sad to see them go. Vox Ex Machina in particular has a soft spot for WoW Insider, after all they published about my World of Warcraft fanfiction. The sites are officially closed. Further coverage at SiliconAngle from Kyt Dotson.

This morning The Elder Scrolls Online developer ZeniMax announced that the MMO title will be dropping subscriptions and become buy-to-play for PC players. The title is also expected to launch on PS4 and Xbox One, with the same deal, on June 9th.

While the game will become buy-to-play without a subscription, ESO is offering a premium subscription membership called ESO Plus. This is expected to provide exclusive in-game bonuses including a monthly allotment of the premium currency, crowns.ZeniMax announced during the live stream that the crown allotment will be 1500 a month.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited includes all the great gameplay from the original PC/Mac game, plus all the updates and content additions, including the exciting new Justice and Champion systems. All existing PC/Mac

Cryptic Studios’s free-to-play Neverwinter Online has a beta coming to Xbox One, signups are already available on the Perfect World Entertainment’s Arc Games website. It will arrive on the console during Feburary 5-8 and is slated for an early 2015 launch for Xbox Live Gold members. Read more about it with Kyt Dotson’s GameOgre coverage.